The history of 'habit'

The new Google N-grams facility allows searching their huge digitized text collection for relative frequencies of terms.  Below is a plot for three concepts that come up often in this blog: 'habit' (blue), 'choice' (red) and 'decision' (green), shown from 1840-2000.  (A pretty amazing resource !)

Data from all English books, 1840-2000, computed 2010.12.17.

For many decades the three terms track each other at around .0035 percent of all items. They begin diverging sharply in the late 1920s, with 'habit' declining steadily from its peak in 1929. 'Decision' rises gently, and then quite sharply beginning in World War II. By 1980 it is at nearly ten times the level of 'habit'. 1929 is also the year in which 'choice' first becomes more frequent than 'habit', and it rises steadily from that point onward.

The data match up quite well with the claim that ideas of habit have been disappearing from our ways of thinking about the sources of action. (As in the Camic 1986 article, "The Matter of Habit".) In the 1920s Dewey could write that "habit is the mainspring of action" without seeming a little odd (in The Public and its Problems). Although our current era has many similarities to the "confused publics" he analyzed, we don't seem to have available for our reflections the  notion of habit as a fundamental human faculty that was an established resource in his time. 

The public and its problems

In 1927 John Dewey laid out a remarkable analysis of why it is so hard to move our society in humane and democratic directions that seem to us so obvious. Despairing again today of our inability to have useful public discussion of our situation, I went back to The public and its problems (1927) and reread his Chapter 5, "Search for the great community".  It's stunning how superficial the changes of the last 85 years seem and how stable are the sources of our troubles.

I may end up writing several posts about this, but here is a first thought. Dewey argues that a deep part of our problem connects to the running theme of this blog: our failure to appreciate the crucial role of habit.

The Public, Dewey says, is "eclipsed": confused, unable to identify its own interests or find its voice. (If you are wondering, here is Dewey's definition: "The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for."[p15-16])  He feels our nominally democratic political institutions are not delivering anything resembling progress toward a life that corresponds to democratic ideals. He asks how we should diagnose our situation and what might help us find our way out of it?

Why hasn't the promise of democratic ideals been realized within our institutions? Dewey's view is that we depended on the assumption that each individual had "the intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of officials, and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility of elected rulers to the desires and and interests of the public." [157]  The "omnicompetent individual" assumed in this approach has proved illusory. We haven't appreciated that because the psychology we assumed 

"held that ideas and knowledge were functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned. Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from crudely intelligized emotions and from habit rather than from rational consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and political philosophy. [158]"

Only the last sentence seems misaligned with our moment. It isn't true in our time that the crucial roles of habit and emotion in generating action are so clearly appreciated.  In retrospect, Dewey may also have overestimated his own era.

He goes on to account for how the omnicompetent view could have prevailed:

The measure of truth it contains was derived from the observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting, and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed measures upon their own concerns.

He goes on to contrast the omnicompetent view with one that acknowledges the character and primacy of habit, saying "Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the most part under the influence of the customs of a group."

Dewey links the question of public helplessness directly to the inadequacies of our received understanding of how human action is generated. Working our way out of our vexing situation will evidently require us to bring habit (and emotion) properly into consideration in the way we think about public discourse, policy design, and education.

"Routine Matters": a talk I gave

On Nov 5 (2010) I gave this talk at the ICOS Seminar at the University of Michigan. Clicking the link will retrieve a flash recording of the slides and audio. 
I also provided a couple of related background papers.  Those are available from this page on the lecture, as is a podcast version of the talk.  To get the papers you have to be registered at ICOS, but that is pretty quick to do, and they have quite a few other interesting lecture recordings, which are listed at http://icos.umich.edu/lectures.

The root meanings of 'patient' and 'agent'

Following my penchant for tracing the history of our key terms, I’ve gone back to examine the pair ‘active’ - ‘passive’ and some other pairs of related terms.  Their Latin roots mean (with a little help from http://wordinfo.info), respectively:

• ag- agen- act- agi- agit- :   to set in motion, to shake; to drive; to do, to act, to lead, to conduct, to guide
• pass- pati-  suffering, feeling; enduring

The one who is active is an ‘agent’ , while the one who is acted upon is a ‘patient’.  This is a quite useful distinction in grammar. At the syntactic level the subject of a verb might not be the one who is actually (semantically) doing something,  as in “The man’s left hand was licked by the dog.”  But at the semantic level the agent in the sentence is the dog and the man's hand is the patient.

We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly.  But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”  

And once we recover the sense of ‘patient’ it becomes easier to see the traditional opposition of  ‘action’ to ‘passion’ .  For many modern readers it can seem odd to say that to be passionate is not active. But over the long history of language, going back to Greek and Latin, the idea has been that a passionate individual was being subjected to emotional or other compelling forces.  Indeed, when we feel emotions we say we "are moved", an idea contained in the very word 'emotion'.  We still retain this sense of being acted upon in the Christian phrase “the passion of Christ”.  The reference is not to Christ’s strong motivation, but rather to what he suffered, or underwent as the patient in the story.

What 'organization' used to mean

In mid-June I spoke at a meeting in Helsinki on “Micro-origins (or, in some titles,  'Micro-foundations') of Routines and Capabilities".  There is a substantial literature – and community – around the topic of organizational capabilities, with the idea that routines are a large component of what organizations are able to do, and therefore we might not expect firms to behave like rational individuals.  This is a congenial perspective for economists who are dissatisfied the conventional theory of the firm.

Nearly every participant hoped to be illuminating some aspect of organizational capabilities.  I thought a while about this phrase and found myself noticing that it is actually somewhat redundant.  ‘To organize’, after all, means to create capabilities (organs, which are instruments, tools, or capabilities to perform functions).  So an organization already is a set of capabilities, and the language we use – without attending to that root sense – actually means something like “the capabilities of a system of capabilities”.  There’s nothing wrong, of course with saying “organizational capabilities” to draw attention to the capabilities themselves and away from the system they constitute.  Still, the invisibility of the redundancy did provide a clear reminder of how far into our mental background the root meaning of ‘organization’ has receded.  

James Gibson and Heraclitus

I've been reading Reasons for Realism, a collection of essays and unpublished memos by James J. Gibson, the psychologist who ideas about affordances have been so influential in the design world (partly as rendered, somewhat controversially, by his former student, Don Norman). There are many striking ideas.

One theme of Gibson's is that we should look at the variability of the world as an advantage rather than as a problem.  "Invariants", as Gibson calls them, are components of affordances and essential guides to action. Mostly, the perceptual invariants he discusses are textures, edges and surfaces. He does allow, especially in the later papers, that other invariants might be persons or events. This is where he gets closest to the foundational issues for organizational action patterns.

A distinctive wrinkle in his argument is that change supports the identification of invariants, rather than being the problem to be overcome.  Instead of wondering how we ever make sense of all that "blooming buzzing confusion", he argues that it helps us sort invariant wheat from chaff – especially since  we can reliably produce some of the change by our own actions.

In some sense every action is an experiment in this view, in which the crucial invariant features of an action or event are sifted from the accidental ones.  “The normal activity of perception is to explore the world. What exploration does is isolate the invariants. The sensory system can separate the permanence from the change only if there is change. “ (p369)

This view gives Gibson a different take on the problem that Jeremy Birnholtz and I called the paradox of the (n)ever-changing world.  We pointed to the tension between Heraclitus (You never step twice in the same river.) and Ecclesiastes (There is no new thing under the sun.).

We took the view that flux was a deeply puzzling problem.  How do (routine) actions come to be seen as "the same" when there is so much variation in their context and in the details of carrying them out?

But Gibson's view suggests that we are designed for the isolating of constancy within flux. We have the same problem just for the perception of an object as the sun comes and goes behind clouds. We somehow use the flux – and even produce it by our own actions – as a key ingredient of perception. 

So Gibson says – thinking of Heraclitus, I'm inclined to suppose – "We perceive the water that flows over the rocks, but [also] that it is the same stream." (p 395). The implications of his ideas on active perception and change go further still, I think. I get to something like: "If two steps in it are in the same water, it isn't a river."

seeing things as a group

My colleague Paul Resnick was discussing some research by Janet Vertesi of UC Irvine. She has been observing teams of scientists who "drive" the Mars Rovers. She sees lots of interesting embodiment as they physically mimic the motions made by a Rover's wheels or mechanical arm. Paul was taken by her observation that identifying their bodies with the Rover played a role in their identification with each other as members of their team. He finished by remarking that seeing the Rover was much more than "just seeing a cup".

I've been thinking about this. I share his view that she's noticed something important about their relations to the Rover and each other, but I'm not sure he's right about the cup.

I think that just seeing the cup has something in common with the Rover story.

Vertesi's conjecture was that identifying with the Rover solidified the group identity of the team of scientists.  Physically projecting themselves into a shared object brought them closer to each other. This reminds me a bit of a lab result that Chip Heath got recently, that experiencing synchrony of movement increased the likelihood that experimental participants would cooperate in mixed motive games. (Wiltermuth and Heath  Psychological Science, 2009.) There is a related finding in JoAnn Brooks' Michigan doctoral dissertation on Presentations as Rites (2004), which looked at the group identification effects of participating (taking part) in powerpoint presentations. And Natalie Sebanz has nice work on seeing "through the eyes of a group".

All this work leads me to think that the objectivity of a perception disposes us to feel linked to – and perhaps more able to cooperate with – the others who share the perception, which its objectivity implies they do.

If there is anything to this, it might suggest some an underexplored reason why even high quality video-conferencing can feel a little unsatisfying.  Even if you see the other person very clearly, and even if expensive equipment lines up your gazes, you are still in a situation where you know that they don't see in their room a lot that you do see in yours.

Tina Dacin's ICOS talk on Cambridge High Table

Tina Dacin of Queens University just gave the ICOS talk on research she's been doing that came out of her sabbatical year at Cambridge. She was fascinated by high table,  the very formal dining traditions within each of the colleges for students, fellows and the college master, with the fellows and master having their own table - often literally on a raised platform in the hall.

She brought out lots of interesting issues about the various functions of these highly-scripted activities: for maintaining universities over time, for affecting social mobility and for reproducing British class consciousness. But the aspect that seems relevant for this blog was her classification of high table as a ritual.

I was of two minds about the choice of that term. Tina has been studying the background scholarship - she started off by listing, among many others, Richard Schechner, Maurice Halbwachs, and Victor Turner, so she probably chose 'ritual' carefully. And that's a term we often use when we want to indicate that things are tightly constrained by norms.  But I also have the idea that to be a ritual a collective activity needs to be efficacious. Marriage, the eucharist, baptism, animal sacrifice and the like actually transform the status of either the universe or some of the participants. If done properly they propitiate the gods, or make you really married. This is part of why it is especially important that they are done correctly.

But at high table, while there is a lot at stake for newbies trying to follow the complex conventions of which fork to use, or which form of address, there isn't really a transformation being effected, as I understand it. (An exception might be those once-a-month occasions when new fellows are inducted into a college. Then someone really is made a fellow.) At a regular dinner, if someone does something that simply "isn't done" (as Dacin noted she was told at one point when she wanted to leave the table to greet a fellow Canadian) it doesn't follow that the purpose of the evening's activity wasn't properly accomplished. In contrast, if the groom doesn't say "I do" at the wedding there are much deeper repercussions.

Wondering about whether I would use 'ritual' (and thinking maybe not), got me thinking about whether I would use 'routine' instead. High table certainly seems like the sort of activities that have been labeled "recurring action patterns" of organizations. But trying to be careful about the terms used within that broad category raises the question of whether very scripted social occasions like high table, conducted regularly within an organization like a Cambridge college, are properly called 'routines'.

It seems like the production of the meal for the participants by the staff would qualify. Dacin went over things like chefs and kitchens and silver-polishing that all have to be mobilized to bring it off every evening.

But what about just filing out to the table in the proper order, wearing your academic gown, eating, drinking and making small talk according to the local social rules? Is a fellow who does that many nights per week engaged in a routine? Is a routine like a ritual, in the classic (efficacious) sense of the term: requiring that a participant feels that correct performance is required to successfully accomplish some larger goal? If so, then maybe high table is not a routine either.

I guess I lean toward the idea that an action pattern could be a routine without meeting the stronger requirements for using 'ritual'. So maybe one could say that Dacin is actually studying the dining routine at Cambridge in the way that Martha Feldman studied the budgeting routine at the university housing office where she did her field work. It could be important to its being a routine that there is some purpose to the activity - in this case that would be dining - but maybe it's not actually a ritual since, with the exception of inductions, no major transformation is accomplished and violations of norms only embarrass the participants involved.

Economic policy analysis and emotions

Robert Frank has an op-ed in today's NY Times that tries to understand why we are being so irrational about global warming. A relatively small certain cost, like a carbon tax can probably avert a gigantic disaster that is moderately likely. This should be an easy one, but apparently it's not.

This strange state of affairs may be rooted in human psychology. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it in a 2006 op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times, “Global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning.”

People tend to have strong emotions about topics like food and sex, and to create their own moral rules around these emotions, he says. “Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action,” he wrote. “If climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.”

Frank's quoting this and his comment on it ("But the human brain is remarkably flexible. Emotions matter, but so does logic.") are instructive about where interesting economics might be heading these days. We'll be better off if we start policy discussions by assuming that reflective choice is not the automatic baseline, but part of a larger process in which emotions and habits play just as large a role as rational problem solving.

If we become more able to make these important choices well, it will only be because we fought for it on all fronts: from political statesmanship in the moment all the way to K-12 funding and curriculum. If we can shift the way we suppose human action is generated and stop presuming that all action originates from choice, we'll be more willing to undertake that struggle, and wiser about how we do it.

About the title…

It's my hope that the title phrase is meaningful in three senses:

1. It's a common usage. We label as ‘routine’ any of the myriad recurring activities that we can accomplish with little thought. These actions that seem hardly to demand our serious attention are Routine Matters. Their nature the subject matter of the blog.
2. The topic may seem dull, but the issues presented by the study of routine and other recurring action patterns could not be more fundamental for our working life, our friendships and family relations, our approaches to education and research – even our national political economy. In this sense the title urges careful examination of what we often take for granted: Routine [Really] Matters [!].
3. There is also the sense conveyed more precisely by printing the title as ‘Routine’ Matters. How we use the term is tightly bound up with the problems we are having when we try to understand recurring action patterns. We may become able to see more clearly if we can free ourselves from the impoverished image that we carry along when we presume that routine activities are always mundane in content, rigidly invariant in execution, and isolated from thought or feeling.